Newsletter No. 976
News-Analysis
April 14, 2008

 

BROADER BASIS FOR JAPAN-YEMEN RELATIONS

We have been suggesting for the past month that Japan-Yemen relations seem to be moving into a higher gear, and there has been a steady flow of articles from the Saba News Agency that underline that fact. We are beginning to see Tokyo and Sanaa address subjects that previously we had never heard about.

Most tantalizing was a brief report about a week ago that Yemeni Deputy Minister of Interior Saleh al-Zawari met in Sanaa with Ambassador Masakazu Toshikage and discussed “boosting security cooperation.” Regrettably, the report provided no hint whatsoever the form that this expanded security cooperation might take. If I might be permitted an educated guess, it could be related to anti-terrorist training for Yemeni police.

Planning and International Cooperation Minister Abdul Karim al-Arhabi is expected to visit Tokyo from April 22nd to 26th. He will discuss Japan’s development aid and to encourage more Japanese businesses to invest in Yemen. We are also informed that he will hand a letter from Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. One news report states that Japan provides about US$20 million annually in aid to Yemen.

A small METI delegation visited Sanaa at the end of March. The main topic on the agenda seems to have been possible Japanese involvement in Yemeni oil and gas, the subject that we introduced in Shingetsu Newsletter Nos. 939 and 949. We don’t know the names of the Japanese officials involved but on the Yemeni side the talks were led by Deputy Minister of Oil and Minerals Ahmed Abdullah Dares.

Yesterday, a two-day Yemeni-Japanese workshop on investment and trade was opened in Sanaa focusing on oil, gas, minerals, tourism, electricity, and fisheries. Opening remarks at the workshop were delivered in person by Prime Minister Ali Mujawar. The prime minister noted that “despite longstanding trade relations between Yemen and Japan, we see that cooperation in the field of investment is still at much lower levels than we are hoping for.” Other key officials who spoke included Minister of Industry and Trade Yahya al-Mutawakel and General Investments Authority (GIA) head Salah al-Attar. The workshop was co-organized by the GIA, the Japanese embassy in Sanaa, and the Yemeni embassy in Tokyo. News reports said that representative of more than thirty Japanese companies attended, as well as about a hundred Yemeni businessmen.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo in mid-March, Yemeni ambassador to Japan Marwan Abdulla Abdulwahab Noman held a meeting with Minister of Education Kisaburo Tokai. They are said to have discussed cultural, scientific and educational cooperation, as well as the specific issue of preparations for the Yemeni Cultural Week in Japan aimed at promoting tourism.

At the beginning of this month, Ambassador Noman visited the five-day Saba Show for Silver Works and Gemstones owned by Yemeni artist Suad Raja. It was hoped that more Japanese might gain an interest in Yemeni culture and arts.

A BOOK ON YEMEN-JAPAN RELATIONS

Despite compiling the Shingetsu Bibliography a few years ago, I had no idea that there were any books out there on the Yemen-Japan bilateral relationship. However, somebody recently sent me such a book. It was published in June 2003 in Sanaa by an author named Dr. Shaif Badr Abdullah. The English title of the book is Yemen-Japan Relations, although it is actually written in three languages: Arabic, English, and Japanese. The main body of the book is in Arabic, which I can no longer read after so many years in Japan, but the English section is a healthy 37 pages of text. The Japanese is limited to a few pictures of personal letters and newspaper articles.

At any rate, the information in this book will come in very handy as I work on the “Japan-Yemen Relations” page at the Shingetsu Institute. The book itself will be housed at the Shingetsu Institute office in Kitakyushu case anyone should visit our little library of Japanese-Islamic relations.